It was the cafe immortalised in La Dolce Vita, the 1960 Fellini study of the ennui and hedonism of postwar Italian society.

But now the Cafe de Paris in Rome has earned an entirely different reputation after being impounded by police who believe it to be part of a property empire, belonging to the 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate.

Police seized more than €200m (£173m) of property allegedly owned by the crime ring today , including other cafes and restaurants, businesses and luxury cars, according to Daniele Galimberti, a Rome police official.

Galimberti said the establishment was briefly shut early in the day for a search.

"We wanted to check how much money there was in the cash register and seize the account books," he said, adding that the authorities had appointed a manager to allow the cafe stay open for the time being. "It's important to guarantee its activity for all those chefs, waiters and other personnel who are working there," he said.

Anti-mafia prosecutors say mobsters are snapping up property in high-rent Rome neighbourhoods. In recent years, the 'Ndrangheta, from the southern Italian region of Calabria, has overtaken the Sicilian mafia to become the most powerful organised crime group in Italy. It dominates the drug trade in Europe, including the trafficking of cocaine from South America.

The Cafe de Paris, which symbolised the glitzy nightlife of the fashionable Via Veneto, was sold in 2005 for €250,000 to a hairdresser from Calabria who, according to police sources, is a suspected member of the Alvaro-Palamara gang.